The Riddle of Composition

2021.11.26

What is the purpose of composition? That question has been a simmering controversy for more than one hundred and fifty years. Historian John C. Brereton (in the introduction to his excellent compilation of primary sources, The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925: A Documentary History) chronicles the origin of the controversy. The academic field of composition studies emerged in the United States after the Civil War. Prior to that time, higher education in the U.S. was focussed on the transmission of received knowledge, not the creation of new knowledge. But technological and social change advanced so rapidly in postbellum America that the country’s many disconnected, traditional colleges had to adapt to become the highly inter-connected network of modern research-oriented universities that rose to prominence in the twentieth century. This shift from education as mastery of received concepts to education as generation of new concepts meant that freshmen entering the world of scholarship needed to be trained in the techniques of composing new ideas. The result was undergraduate composition curricula.

The simplicity of that utilitarian origin story is misleading, however. The purpose of composition studies was not clear then, nor is it now. This essay will sketch the dominant schools of thought regarding the purpose of university composition and then propose a unifying approach to writing instruction that attempts to tie all those schools of thought together with a shared practical and theoretical foundation.

Since its inception in the 1870s, there has been widespread agreement that the undergraduate composition course is necessarily a “service course” (Behrens 561), meaning it trains students in the practice of writing so that they can then be successful in using that practice outside the composition classroom. But what venue such a service course is supposed to prepare students to write for has been the subject of intense debate, especially since the pedagogical shift from “writing-as-product” to “writing-as-process” that occurred during the second half of the twentieth century (Mills, Murray).

Some theorists, such as Behrens, argue that university writing instruction should focus exclusively on teaching students how to communicate effectively within the conventions of academic discourse so that they will be successful in the rest of their studies (561). Others, like Nan Miller, contend universities should adopt a method of teaching writing that will best prepare students for the job market after college (12–13). Advocates of Social Constructionism such as David Bartholomae, on the other hand, believe that the purpose of composition studies is to teach students how to acculturate themselves to different discourse communities so that they are not victimized by the “power politics of discursive practice” that regulate such communities (64).

Finally, there is also a lengthy and historical debate regarding the proper place of creative writing within composition studies. Many universities treat expository composition instruction as prerequisite to studying creative writing. However, that was not a fait accompli for many compositionists in the past (Kinneavy) nor is it in the present (Sumpter). To many, voice and narrative — typical subject matters of a creative writing class — belong on the composition syllabus right next to persuasion and argument.

Though these four schools of thought appear radically different, all agree on a functionalist axiom: the purpose behind the study of composition — whether that purpose be academic, professional, political, or creative — is to prepare students for some specific kind of writing they will be required to do in the future. Put more concretely, all four schools assume the purpose of the university composition course must be determined by what the student will do with her writing ability after she has completed the course. Will she get an A on her economics essay? Land her dream job? Reform society? Publish a bestselling novel? All these functionalist purposes presuppose the very writing skills that university composition is supposed to teach.

Thus, the truer, more primary purpose of composition studies is to identify what those skills are and then teach students how to develop and master them systematically. The previous sentence may sound obvious, but it is not. If it were, there would not exist so many competing views across the field of composition studies regarding the most fundamental question of the entire discipline, namely, what is the purpose of that discipline? The remainder of this essay will attempt to construct a provisional answer to that question through a close examination of the activity of writing.

Composition refers to both the act of writing and the thing written. The textbook Acting on Words defines “writing” in a way that is helpful when distinguishing between these two senses of the term: “Writing is both the act of putting thoughts on pages for the purpose of communication and the resulting text that intends to communicate ideas” (Brundage 5). The four functionalist schools of thought sketched above all derive their chosen purpose for composition studies from the “ideas” part of that definition. All four seek to answer the question, “What kind of ideas should we prepare students to communicate?” And all four provide laudable answers.

However, there is a far more important question to be asked based on the two-part definition: “How does one put thoughts on pages for the purpose of communication?” That is the hard part. That is what most people struggle with when they struggle to write. The “thoughts” part of the definition should be the cornerstone of the study of composition because putting thoughts on pages is composition. It is composing in the truest sense of the term: externalizing thoughts so they can be developed, disentangled, reconsidered. It is the skill one must call upon when confronted by a white-as-snow Microsoft Word document. Composition is thought in action.

There are theorists in the recent past who have implicitly adopted this understanding of composition. One such theorist is so relevant he deserves specific mention. Peter Elbow captures the essence of the act of composing in the following important sentence: “The germ event in writing — perhaps in thinking itself — is being able to make the move between a piece of nonverbal felt meaning and a piece of language” (Writing With Power xviii, emphasis his).

To write a sentence is to cross a threshold from the inchoate mind-world of nascent ideas to the tangible product of a piece of writing. That move is difficult, and it can be very stressful, but it is how the mind comes to make sense of experience, to bring order to chaos. Elbow spent half a century figuring out how to trigger that germ event and empowering others to do so as well. If one examines closely his practical and theoretical works, one must conclude that he views composition as a systematic method of taking felt meanings from the edge of awareness and articulating them into language, written language that has its own objective existence.

Note: Elbow is often portrayed as representative of a school of compositional theory known as Expressivism because he emphasizes the role of voice and individual expression in his writing pedagogy (Sumpter 342). Though he has written much about voice and expression, most of his works — especially the influential ones written for a popular audience, Writing Without Teachers and Writing With Power — take as their pedagogical start point the thought-in-action approach advocated here. Rather than Expressivist’, a better label for Elbow’s philosophy of composition would be ‘Thinkivist.’

Once language emerges from nonlanguage, it can be refined through drafting, revising, and editing. But the basic act of composition, translating the preconceptual into concepts, is primary, and any theory of composition that cannot explain how that move happens is a theory divorced from practice.

That thought-in-action approach to writing instruction is more imperative now than it has ever been. Many compositionists are currently tempted to adopt yet another raison d’être for their field, namely, to train students in the emerging forms and genres of writing brought about by advances in digital communications. Courses in ‘new media’ and ‘digital humanities’ are rapidly transforming the field. But this is only the latest — and most insidious — form of the functionalist axiom.

Take for example Lisa Dush’s cautionary 2015 essay “When Writing Becomes Content.” Dush argues that “networked digital composition” (181) is fundamentally different from what has traditionally been taught in composition classes because writing understood as content “is judged not on whether it communicates very useful information (its use value), but rather on the number of clicks and retweets it accumulates (its exchange value, rendered as ad revenue or brand reach)” (178).

Though she offers many warnings, qualifications, and caveats, Dush ultimately argues that composition studies cannot ignore “writing’s unavoidable status as content” (183) and that writing instructors must therefore train their students in the skills of the content professions, such as writing for “machine audiences” (176) and “composing for recomposition” (189).

This is terrifying. Such a pedagogy must inevitably hold that a piece of writing is to be judged not on the merits of its ideas but on the optimization of its metadata. If pursued to its logical conclusion, this practice will eventually subordinate thinking to data processing, judgement to calculation. The infinite power of the human mind to compose new ideas will have then been sacrificed upon an altar of algorithms.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow.” College Composition and Communication, Volume 46, Number 1. February 1995. https://0-doi-org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/10.2307/358870. Accessed 27 October 2021.

Behrens, Laurence. “Meditations, Reminiscences, Polemics: Composition Readers and the Service Course.” College English, Volume 41, Number 5. January 1980. https://0-doi-org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/10.2307/375727. Accessed 11 November 2021.

Brereton, John C. The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875–1925: A Documentary History. University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995.

Brundage, David and Lahey, Michael (editors). Acting on Words: An Integrated Rhetoric, Research Guide, Reader, and Handbook, 3rd Edition. Pearson, 2012.

Dush, Lisa. “When Writing Becomes Content.” College Composition and Communication, Volume 67, Number 2. December 2015. http://0-search.proquest.com.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/scholarly-journals/when-writing-becomes-content/docview/1749628317/se-2?accountid=8408. Accessed 9 November 2021.

Elbow, Peter. Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Oxford University Press, 1981.

Elbow, Peter. Writing Without Teachers. Oxford University Press, 1973.

Kinneavey, James L. “The Aims of Discourse.” College Composition and Communication, Volume 20, Number 5. December 1969. https://0-doi-org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/10.2307/355033. Accessed 1 October 2021.

Miller, Nan. “Postmodern Moonshine in English 101.” Academic Questions: A Publication of the National Association of Scholars. September 2006. https://0-www-proquest-com.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/docview/603593368/A1C5720303A348ADPQ/3?accountid=8408. Accessed 7 July 2021.

Mills, Barriss. “Writing as Process.” College English, Volume 15, Number 1. October 1953. https://0-doi-org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca/10.2307/371599. Accessed 17 August 2021.

Murray, Don. “Teach Writing as a Process Not Product.” The Essential Don Murray: Lessons from America’s Greatest Writing Teacher. Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 2009.

Sumpter, Matthew. “Shared Frequency: Expressivism, Social Constructivism, and the Linked Creative Writing-Composition Class.” College English, Volume 78, Number 4. March 2016. http://0-www.jstor.org.aupac.lib.athabascau.ca//stable/44077498. Accessed 12 November 2021.